Month: July 2016

I’ve found them very enriching. Most of them use the same speechwriting techniques as I do: three part lists, metaphor and rhyme – because they’re designed to be read aloud.

Young men, eager to do a good best man speech, often send me their scripts. I keep an open mind, but I nearly always have to give a long sigh when I finish reading. They describe in tedious detail their life of adventures with the groom. Anecdotes go on for paragraphs.

Mrs Thatcher’s former speechwriter Ronnie Millar features prominently in it.

Gove, Johnson, Hannan: I was a young Tory like them at university, and it explains to me the spell I got caught up in during the Thatcher years. It’s the mythology that they used in the Brexit campaign.

My work as a speechwriter has taught me why these ideas should be put in bottles and branded as harmful substances. I had hoped the referendum would condemn them to the oblivion they richly deserved. But I was wrong.

They have ‘subordinated reason to the heroic myth’. If you watch the Adam Curtis video, you’ll see, as Alan Clarke explains, they’ve ‘drunk the potion’.